These Documents Are Damning, and the Senate Knows It

The second-most preposterous thing about putting Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt in charge of the Environmental Protection Agency was the fact that the Senate hustled to install him in the job, because they knew that a court-ordered document dump was coming this week that would make his appointment even more absurd than the most preposterous thing about putting him in charge—which is that Pruitt was suing the very agency he'd been picked to lead.

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Well, the other shoe dropped on Wednesday. According to The New York Times, the document dump was pretty much what everybody figured was coming.

The publication of the correspondence comes just days after Mr. Pruitt was sworn in to run the E.P.A., which is charged with reining in pollution and regulating public health. "Thank you to your respective bosses and all they are doing to push back against President Obama's EPA and its axis with liberal environmental groups to increase energy costs for Oklahomans and American families across the states," said one email sent to Mr. Pruitt and an Oklahoma congressman in August 2013 by Matt Ball, an executive at Americans for Prosperity. That nonprofit group is funded in part by the Kochs, the Kansas business executives who spent much of the last decade combating federal regulations, particularly in the energy sector. "You both work for true champions of freedom and liberty!" the note said.

During the hearings into his nomination, as well as during the lengthy debate on the Senate floor, Pruitt was lambasted by senators over his relationship with a company called Devon Energy. (Edward Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, put Pruitt on a rotating spit over the fact that, in 2011, a letter he wrote to the EPA opposing a federal regulation limiting methane gas leaks, a cause dear to Devon's black corporate heart, was copied nearly word for word from a draft letter sent to him by the company.) It turns out that their spooning was even more ardent than the Senate surmised that it was.

The most frequent correspondence was with Devon Energy, which has aggressively challenged rules proposed by the E.P.A. and the Department of Interior's Bureau of Land Management, which controls drilling on federal lands—widespread in the west. In the 2014 election cycle, Devon was one of the top contributors to the Republican Attorneys General Association, which Mr. Pruitt led for two years during that period.

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In a March 2013 letter to Mr. Pruitt's office, William Whitsitt, then an executive vice president of Devon, referred to a letter his company had drafted for Mr. Pruitt to deliver, on Oklahoma state stationery, to Obama administration officials. Mr. Pruitt, meeting with White House officials, made the case that the rule, which would rein in planet-warming methane emissions, would be harmful to his state's economy. His argument was taken directly from Mr. Whitsitt's draft language. "To follow up on my conversations with Attorney General Pruitt and you, I believe that a meeting — or perhaps more efficient, a conference call — with OIRA (the OMB Office of Information and Regulatory Analysis) on the BLM rule should be requested right away," Mr. Whitsitt wrote. "The attached draft letter (or something like it that Scott is comfortable talking from and sending to the acting director to whom the letter is addressed) could be the basis for the meeting or call." The letter referred to the section of the White House Office of Management and Budget that coordinates regulations throughout the government.

The 7,564 documents were released in order to comply with a judge's order in an open-records lawsuit brought by the Center For Media and Democracy and, as Bloomberg notes, they reveal how various industry groups advised Pruitt on the best ways to keep the EPA from doing its job.

Released e-mails show Pruitt collaborated with the top U.S. refining trade group to mount an attack on annual biofuel quotas in 2013. According to an analysis by the Center for Media and Democracy, the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers group provided Pruitt with drafted sample language for an Oklahoma petition. In a July 13, 2013 e-mail, an AFPM official asks Pruitt to file a petition with the EPA challenging biofuel quotas. "We think it would be most effective for Oklahoma to file a separate waiver petition that emphasizes 'severe environmental harm,' as this argument is more credible coming from a state," an AFPM representative told Pruitt.

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And there are tender thanks for Pruitt's efforts from what appear to have been his real constituency as attorney general.

In a February 2014 e-mail, Stuart Solomon, president and chief operating officer of American Electric Power's Oklahoma subsidiary, wrote to personally thank Pruitt after the EPA withdrew a then-proposed regional haze rule designed to protect the air around national parks. "Your lawsuit against the EPA and your encouragement of our efforts to settle this issue in a way that benefits the state were instrumental in giving us the time and the opportunity to develop a revised state plan," Solomon wrote.

On Tuesday, Scott Pruitt gave his first speech to the EPA's employees as their new administrator. It was not reassuring. These revelations are a pretty good indication why.

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